Shortly after Alberto Giacometti’s death in 1966, Eli Lotar sought the help of Pierre Matisse to exploit all the photographs he had taken over several years in the sculptor's studio while serving as a model. But Lotar's lassitude, illness and isolation go to explain the incompleteness of this, his last photographic project, on the eve of his own death in 1969. This meeting between Lotar and Giacometti reveals, however, a singular, balanced dialogue, with Lotar photographing Giacometti and Giacometti sculpting Lotar: a game of mirrors revealing a deep friendship born in the carefree and creative intensity of the inter-war years, which this lecture will strive to trace.
Damarice AMAO
Doctor in the history of art and photography, Damarice Amao is a conservation assistant in the Photography Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art / Pompidou Centre. Her expertise covers the field of avant-garde photography and surrealism. Alongside Clément Chéroux, she curated the exhibition Jacques–André Boiffard, la parenthèse surréaliste held at the Pompidou Centre in 2014. Her thesis on the photographer Eli Lotar has just been published by Textuel (Eli Lotar et le mouvement des images, 2017). As co-curator, she was in charge of the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to Eli Lotar at the Jeu de Paume in spring 2017. As part of the 40th anniversary of the Pompidou Centre, she has just published with Karolina Lewandowska, Le spectre du surréalisme, an exhibition about the survival of surrealism in contemporary photography, presented at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in summer 2017.